“Good afternoon,” a woman said in English, ushering us inside. “I’m Dr. Carson.” I’d studied English since the first grade but considered it a murky language, one whose grammar seemed to have been made up on the fly. Still, I resolved to concentrate and pick up as much as I could. Dr. Carson shook my parents’ hands, hard. The door of her flat opened directly into the living room, and she led us to her sofa, a fixture too big for the room and covered in pilling floral throw pillows. Black-and-white photos of sickly children being hugged by toothy American doctors hung poster-size on all walls. MEDIMISSION, said the posters in block lettering beneath the photos, followed by an assortment of uplifting slogans about children and miracles and the future.
Dr. Carson was thin and blond and had the same teeth as the people in the posters, and I resolved to dislike her based on these things, the perkiness in her face that reminded me of the way teachers spoke to students who they thought were stupid. But I knew she was Rahela’s best chance at getting better; though Dr. Carson’s uniform consisted of blue jeans, rubber gloves, and a stethoscope, she still had better equipment than all the real doctors’ offices back home.
She drew blood in her kitchen. “It’s sterile,” she said over and over, as if we had other options. I didn’t like seeing Rahela’s tiny arm pinned against the woman’s countertop, though Rahela wasn’t crying, hadn’t cried since we arrived. She looked tired. I looked away, stared at an image of an Asian girl, half her face burned, contorted like gnarled tree bark. A doctor held her on his knee and applied a bandage.
Dr. Carson ran more tests. She and my parents conversed in broken languages, my mother translating for my father in semicoherent chunks. Rahela’s kidneys weren’t functioning properly, the ultrasound showed. It looked as if she might have only one, though the images were inconclusive even with the newer equipment.
“There are better machines for these tests, in other cities,” Dr. Carson said. “But for now we can try medication. To stabilize.” My mother barraged her with questions. The two switched completely to English, and my father and I stood back fidgeting. Dr. Carson disappeared into her kitchen, then returned with a stack of papers and a small glass bottle of red and blue capsules.
“Twice a day. We’ll be in touch.”
At border control my father cranked down the window and offered our passports to the approaching officer, whose eyes flitted between our faces and ID photos with increasing curiosity.
“Are you sure you want to go back over there?” He gestured with his head toward the border and spoke with something between condescension and genuine concern.
My father snatched at our papers and rolled the window up so fast I thought he might close the officer’s hand inside. He opened his mouth to say something through the glass, but seemed to think better of it and accelerated across the border into Croatia.
“What kind of question is that?” he asked after a while, his voice raw. “Of course we want to go back. Of course we’re going home.”
—
“You awake?” My father poked his head into the living room that night. “I have a story for you.” I sat up on the couch with my back against the armrest. My father was holding my favorite book, Tales from Long Ago. The fairy tales inside were very old and very famous, and the copy we had was so worn we’d had to tape the middle pages back in.
“Which one?”
“One day,” he read, “a young man stumbled into Stribor’s Forest. He didn’t know the forest was enchanted and that all kinds of magical creatures lived there. Some of the forest’s magic was good and some was evil, and the whole place would stay enchanted until the right person entered it to break the spell—someone who preferred his own life, even with its sorrows, over all the ease and happiness in the world.” My father snapped the book shut and I pretended to be patient, knowing he would continue, that he didn’t need the words in front of him.
“The young man was headed home to his mother after chopping wood when”—my father jumped up and feigned stumbling—“he crossed the threshold into Stribor’s kingdom. Inside, everything seemed to glow with little flecks of gold, as if it were coated in fireflies.”
I tried to think of a place in Zagreb where everything was clean and twinkling, but the city did not feel very magical of late.
“And the woman who appeared before him in the clearing was no exception. She was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen.”
“She wasn’t!” I said. “She was faking!”
“You’re right. The woman was really a snake in disguise. But the young man didn’t know it. He was willfully blinded by her beauty.”
“His mother knew, though.”
“When the young man brought her home, his mother saw right away that the woman had the forked tongue of a ssssssssserpent!” My father stuck out his tongue in a reptilian hiss. “The young man’s mother tried to warn him, but he ignored her. He was happy, he insisted. Soon, he and the serpent-woman were married.
“The new daughter-in-law treated the young man’s mother very badly. The mother was old, but the daughter-in-law made her work hard, cooking and cleaning and tending the garden. At night, the mother sat in her room and cried, wishing for a way out of her predicament—”
“And?” I interrupted here, my favorite part. “The fairies!”
“The fairies had heard the cry of one desperate for help. So, in the middle of the night, they flew up the mountainside to the village and into the house through the kitchen window.”